Gavin Fry

My primary interests are the culture of needlework, the use of the visual diary and sketchbook as an investigative tool, the process of transcognitivity in practice and the applications of active documentation in the studio and in student learning. I am also interested in pre-institutional factors affecting learning and individual exploration. In the wider field of visual communication I believe that it is important to differentiate between preferences and problems when it comes to instruction and analysis of a students potential and the dialogues that accompany learning.

For a student to acquire useful experiences, and for them to accumulate applicable technical and conceptual skills I think it is vital to provide a structured learning environment that allows for safe expression and reflection. In addition critique is a valuable necessary tool for growth to occur; a student needs to experience learning as a straightforward dialogue between themselves, their cohort and staff but they must feel that they have the right systems and boundaries in place to do this. It is this that I hope to facilitate.

When enabling students to become questioning makers and observers we need to equip them within a classroom protocol to be fully aware of their own sense of difference in a post-medium and post-narrative world.

I supervise at PhD and MA levels working with those studying by independent project/research interests.

I have been PhD external examiner for Christian Newby at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University, London. Thesis title ZQ-II: ‘16 -’22: a practice-based research project that redirects the function of a hand-held carpet-tufting gun from its origin as a manufacturing device and explores its more mutable and itinerant capacities. It couples drawing with publishing, performing as complementary nodes within a textile practice concerned with the activities of assemblage and re-assemblage, capturing key moments within this process. https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/53105/1/Newby-C-53105.pdf

Future fields of study for supervision should include a practice based element and the subject/topic needs to directly investigate the visual arts/visual communication. My supervisory interests relate to but are not restricted to my own research areas (making and masculinity, textiles and communication) because I teach widely within the very open field of the crafts and arts, and in graphic visual communication but would not want to limit supervision requests.